The 21st century’s most thrilling saga — the smuggling of Pistol and Boo, Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s little dogs into Australia — ended fittingly with a denouement as explosive as its first two acts: a dropping of all charges against Heard and a positive character assessment by an Australian magistrate.

Yes, after all the trials and hearings and thinly-veiled venom (and reminders that Heard and Depp are an actual, not-gross-at-all thing) it, like so much sound and fury, all amounted to nothing.

Well, not quite nothing.

The world did get gifted a marvelous little nugget of madness, in the form of a scripted apology video (sadly not directed by Tim Burton) that Heard and Depp showed at their last Gold Coast hearing earlier today. It’s…

Well, here it is:

It’s Monday and I’ve only had one coffee so far so the nuance of this is far too much for me to unpack right now. But I do get the vague feeling that all of this, start to finish, may just have been one long Coen Brothers movie.

The presiding magistrate, accepting the apology, said of the video that it’d be ‘of far more benefit’ to Australia as a warning to any potential illegal importers than a conviction against Heard. Which, fair enough, but you know they really screwed the pooch by not delivering the punishment that the rest of the world had been waiting for: